


Ending Badly

by lizard_witch



Category: John Wick (Movies)
Genre: Age Difference, Biting, Blood, Face Slapping, M/M, Semi-Public Sex, Unhealthy Relationships, Unsafe Sex, i.e. the good shit
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-25
Updated: 2020-03-10
Packaged: 2021-02-28 03:35:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22887178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lizard_witch/pseuds/lizard_witch
Summary: This isn’t a love story for the ages. It’s not even a romance. It was always going to end badly.
Relationships: Santino D'Antonio/John Wick
Comments: 12
Kudos: 107





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Love to fall back into writing fic for a movie that came out two years ago and has the tiniest fandom I've ever bellyflopped into. 
> 
> This will not involve healthy relationships, safe sex, or wholesome attitudes towards the world. Ahhhh, the #brand.

When Santino D’Antonio is sixteen, he is kidnapped. It is not unexpected for a child of the High Table, but it is less than ideal for his own physical comfort or his family’s standing. He has been summoned from the relative safety of his fortress-like and secretive Swiss boarding school, surrounded by the spoiled scions of international banking syndicates and defunct principalities, to the far more interesting underbelly of New York. He is to observe, to be seen and not heard, as his father negotiates a new deal with the Russians, something about eliminating a clan who have become irritating for both the D’Antino enterprises and the rising Tarasovs. 

All goes smoothly, boringly, in transit from the cloister of school to the sprawl of the city; the ant-like city grid from above becomes the close, dirt-and-glitter of the street as his father’s spare bodyguards bicker over which route from the airport will have less traffic. There is a new bartender at the Continental they both seem to think they stand a chance of bedding; Santino thinks they both look like potatoes with cauliflower ears and the waitstaff, male and female, of the Continentals seem to be hired from modelling agencies so the likelihood of any of that happening is low at best. Not that his luck has been any better. He is still seen as a child by the staff, marked as the D’Antonio spare and treated with kid gloves.

His jet-lagged self-pity about not being able to get laid in New York is interrupted violently: the car lurches sideways and the world seems to explode into glass around him. His ears ring, his vision whites out as his head cracks against something: the door? the seat in front of him? His skin feels hot, shredded in places. The sharp explosions of close gunfire thud against his already damaged hearing as the car stills. Not an accident. Blood, his own and not, fills his mouth: his vision clears to see the back of Davide’s head is missing. Shouting. Italian. Feminine screaming from somewhere, American. A pedestrian? He’s dizzy, dazed. He thinks he sees the Continental in the distance. The door, sans glass, is pulled open. He is pulled out, roughly, a cloth shoved over his face. He cannot hold his breath, and the sweet, sticky smell of chloroform overwhelms him. 

He comes to with a throbbing headache and the taste of stale blood still in his mouth. His shoulders ache, wrenched awkwardly upwards; his hands are numb and his wrists chafe. Too-tight zip ties, looped over a pipe by another. He isn’t gagged or blindfolded: somewhere no one will hear him, and no one cares if he sees them. Or they want him to see them. His head is killing him, he can’t think that clearly, and none of the options are good. Men lurk in the corners of the room, of the type with which he’s most familiar: suited, armed, and tense, all of whom dart their attention towards him and hands towards holsters when he spits. Or tries to spit; his mouth is dry. 

At least he’s not dead. That’s a start. 

One of the grunts mutters into his sleeve and a door opens. Through it streams a cluster of men in slightly better suits, just as tense. These Santino recognises: the head of the Romano family, his consigliere and bodyguards, and the Tarasovs, with their new dog of a killer, the one they call Baba Yaga, their boogeyman. He is younger in person than the grainy security photos Santino saw made him look, not so frightening at all. Santino is far more concerned by how on edge they all seem, as if things are not going according to plan _vis-a-vis_ his kidnapping. Kidnappings that don’t go according to plan usually end badly for the kidnapped.

“He looks half dead already,” one of the Tarasovs says, and it doesn’t sound like he approves. Santino feels half dead, and doesn’t approve either. 

“He’s well enough for now,” Romano counters. “Are you in or not?” 

The Tarasovs consult in Russian; Santino only knows a choice selection of key insults and can’t follow, but they don’t sound happy. Their Baba Yaga doesn’t participate in their discussions. He only looks around slowly, taking in the room with inscrutable eyes. 

“We are in,” the other Tarasov grunts, the older one. “We will discuss terms. Get him cleaned up, D’Antino won’t play along if he thinks the boy is already dead.” 

They aren’t going to ask his opinion, but frankly Santino thinks his father is unlikely to play along regardless, whatever they’re trying to leverage him to obtain. Giovanni D’Antonio has been nothing but clear on that point. Gianna is the heir, the valuable one, he is a spare and Giovanni is hale enough yet to get more children if needed. If Santino is stupid enough to get kidnapped, Giovanni will most likely not negotiate: he will simply burn to the ground the offending party’s business, and uproot their family tree, taking out every branch. A ransom other than cash, like giving up any of his territory or business concerns, for something as replaceable as a younger child, would make him weak in the eyes of other families. Maybe as a show of strength he might storm the place, if he can find out where Santino is. 

_Maybe._

The hours, once the bosses leave the room, blur. Someone cuts his wrists free and lets him drink, wash his face, piss. Someone else zip ties his wrists together again, at least not to the pipe, shoves a newspaper in his hands, blinds him with the flash of a polaroid camera. No one speaks to him. He does not try to speak to them, either. He sleeps, some, wedged in a corner, but it isn’t restful or refreshing. He is given food, more water; he sleeps more. It’s somehow the most terrifying and fucking _boring_ event of his life.

It is dark in the room, and he is alone, when he is startled awake by the crack of gunfire and muffled shouting. It sounds like chaos in full swing and moving closer. The room is devoid of anything to be used as a weapon, not even the bucket he’d pissed in earlier. No cover. He hauls himself upright, and faces the door: no point in dying huddled in a corner shitting with fear, shaming his father to the last, even if he’s irrationally distracted by how his feet are asleep. Going to be shot in a windowless cinder block basement and all he can think about is the blood rushing back to his toes, fuck sake, and his hands are still numb, and he’s never been fucked. The gunshots are louder, the shouting just outside. It sounds like someone is thrown into the door, hard, and something blocks the faint line of light coming in at the bottom. A body, maybe. He forgets all the prayers his mother taught him, everything from catechism, not that God gives a fuck about a bisexual baby camorrista who hasn’t been to confession in three years and masturbates in the locker room showers after dark thinking about the polo team captain.

He’s going to die scared and horny and numb and unfucked and the only person who’ll mourn him is his old nanny, God bless her. Fuck. 

A final burst of gunfire and it goes quiet, horribly quiet. The shadow blocking the light under the door moves with a dull thud, like someone’s shoved a corpse out of the way. Santino bites the inside of his cheek and raises his chin, narrows his eyes, tries to keep his knees from shaking as the door opens. It’s blinding, for a moment, the glaring fluorescent silhouetting whoever it is who’s come for him. He blinks, blinks again; he’s not shot. 

“Mr. D’Antonio, are you hurt?” The silhouette speaks.

  
Whatever Santino had thought the Tarasovs’ boogeyman would sound like, it wasn’t this, quiet and a bit rough, like he doesn’t speak much. It’s oddly soothing coming from someone who he can now see is splattered with blood, with an imposing assault rifle swinging from a strap over his shoulder with the same casual familiarity as Santino carries his bookbag. He shakes his head, and croaks a no that he thinks must immediately reveal how shitscared he actually is. 

The boogeyman crosses the room, slowly, like Santino’s a skittish pony or some trafficked girl on a bad trip. “Your hands,” he says, and pulls a knife. Santino offers his wrists, leaning back against the wall with what he hopes isn’t too-obvious relief as the boogeyman slices through the zip ties. Calloused hands turn his over, checking the raw rubbing and scratches from the car accident. He’s already wracked with adrenaline, and he’s rapidly tipping over from scared to horny: the boogeyman is handsome, and intense, and intensely in his personal space. His mouth is so dry, his heart is pounding. “Can you shoot, if you need to?” 

It is not the most dignified moment of his sixteen years, replying, “Huh?”

Not even _che?_ Not even _quoi_ ? The dull American _huh_ , like the slack-jawed Tarasov boy looking up from his Gameboy at the first meeting of the families. The boogeyman’s expression doesn’t change, waiting for an answer. Santino flushes, hot and stupid, and nods. The boogeyman releases his hands, presses a handgun—a Glock, solid and square—into them, and jerks his head to indicate Santino should follow him out of the room. Santino swallows, checks the safety is off, and obeys.

The hallway is littered with bodies. The two suited guards, who gave him water and took his picture, just outside the door. They pass two more in silence, another around the corner; Santino spares a glance into an open door to see three or four more. He thinks one might be the Romano consigliere—Marco, his brain supplies, Marco De Paolo, a cousin of the Romanos, now useless information because the man appears to have died clutching his own intestines. A giggle, creepy even to his own ears, bubbles out of him. The boogeyman shoots him a dark look and Santino chokes on the dregs of his own cracked laughter. They move silently through the rest of the charnel house, passing still more corpses, until they’re both spat out into the dense summer air of a New York night, or early dawn. 

A row of SUVs are waiting for them, headlights blazing in their direction. A door opens, ejecting a Tarasov: Viggo, he thinks. The boogeyman gently, so surprisingly gently for a man who has just killed at least a dozen people for Santino’s rescue, nudges him towards the car. Viggo grasps him roughly by the chin, jerking his face to the left and to the right like he’s assessing a dog after a fight. He’s released again, just as roughly, and Viggo rubs a hand over his head with a bellicose laugh. It’s somehow more humiliating than pissing in a bucket with two goons watching him. “You’ll live, eh? And tell your _papa_ who got you out of this mess.”  
  


It’s not a question. It’s not even something that needs to be said: the Tarasovs wouldn’t have sent their prized monster in to get him if they didn’t intend to use this to garner goodwill with his father. Santino will owe them, too, when he comes to a position of power. It’s not a marker, but it’s a debt he will have to pay somehow. To the Tarasovs, and to their boogeyman. 

“Of course, Signore Tarasov,” he says, as solemnly as possible. He’s coasting on the fumes of adrenaline now, and his hands are starting to shake, with shock and exhaustion, not ideal when he’s still clutching a cocked nine-mil handgun. But there is one body he hasn’t seen yet, a trophy without which he cannot return to his father if he is to scrape any sort of dignity out of this whole ordeal: Giulio Romano. He turns to the Boogeyman and clears his throat, before realising he doesn’t actually know the man’s name. Fuck. “Signore,” he says, and cuts himself off before saying _Baba Yaga_. “Did you kill Romano, in there?”

Tarasov laughs again. “Oh, show him, John. He’s been brave, eh, a real tough guy.” The boogeyman— _John_ —nods abruptly and opens the door to the adjacent SUV. Giulio Romano, dishevelled and sweating like the greasy pig he is, is slumped on the floor with his hands zip tied together, beady eyes rolling in terror, slurring what sounds like a prayer around the gag in his mouth. Santino can’t stop the laughter bubbling up again: at least he handled being tied up with a bit more dignity than this grown man, a mob boss with the blood of half a dozen men on his hands directly and indirectly, scores if one counts the men John has just killed for him. It’s almost hysterical, and were Santino not a child of the high table, at that moment he might have worried about his own sanity. But he has been born and bred into the Arrangement, and the presence of the boogeyman, _John_ , behind him, is reassuring. And so he doesn’t look to Viggo Tarasov, or John, for permission before shooting Romano. 

It is a point of pride that he doesn’t throw up until after John delivers him safely back to his father, with Romano’s blood still on his face.

And he keeps the gun. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Santino is twenty-three, bored off his tits, and nowhere near drunk enough on a stool in the bar of Continentale di Roma.

Santino is twenty-three, bored off his tits, and nowhere near drunk enough on a stool in the bar of Continentale di Roma. The afterparty of a family merger swirls around the room, one of his innumerable cousins and some girl from Milan, which surprisingly is as much a love match as a business arrangement. It’s also interminable, with increasingly sloppy and tediously vulgar speeches from the expansive wedding parties on both sides breaking up the raucous singing and dancing. Once Giovanni and the lesser patriarchs and grandparents and great aunts had retired, it had become lewd and yet, somehow, more boring. Perhaps all the tension of the cousins drunk on the top shelf liquor, trying to hold in their worst impulses around Santino’s father, had at least kept it entertaining. One of Giovanni’s namesakes had nearly thrown up under his father’s withering gaze; having been on the receiving end more times than he can count, he’s almost sympathetic but he’s never been stupid enough to be shitfaced around the man. 

He loosens the top button of his shirt against the stuffiness in the room and finishes his drink. His tie had been removed almost immediately after his father left, jacket not long after that, but there are limits to his informality: his waistcoat remains on, his sleeves rolled down, and he certainly will not be stripping to his undershirt as some of the more inebriated guests have done at previous weddings. At least his security detail is off duty; surrounded by relatives- _cum_ -employees, cannon fodder, and on Continental grounds, the D’Antonio head and his heirs should be safe.

In the darker corners and densely cushioned booths, people are pairing off; Gianna has already disappeared upstairs with the groom’s brother, and there are certainly more weddings in the offing. One of the bridesmaids has her sights set on him, and if she hadn’t loudly informed her table she planned to snare herself a husband tonight while looking at him like a stalker, he might have gone for it, but the lack of subtlety alone disqualified her for a casual hookup. He doesn’t need anyone getting ideas that he’s available for matchmaking, or the drama of accidentally fucking someone’s girlfriend. 

The men are, too a one, even less viable as candidates. Primarily, shockingly, his father has not been, and will ideally never be, informed of his penchant for cock, and none of these idiots looks like they can keep their mouths shut even if they were similarly inclined towards holding him down and fucking him til he forgets his own name. 

He orders another negroni and considers retreating upstairs to the quiet solitude of his suite to get properly drunk in dignified privacy, maybe think about texting the player for A.S. Roma who lives in his building and with whom he occasionally exchanges bodily fluids. 

Santino accepts the drink and leans against the bar. He eyes the exit, wondering if he can make it out before the bridesmaid from hell sees him leaving and makes her move. It’s getting rowdier, the normally dignified surroundings turning into something resembling a student dive. He left his phone upstairs before the service, so doesn’t even have a screen to distract him until he can make a safe, if childish, escape. The ice melting in his glass is not nearly as entertaining as his phone would have been, or the opportunity to have meaningless sex with a less-crazy bridesmaid in the elevator. 

He is not, categorically _not_ , expecting to look up from his contemplation of the orange slice in his drink to see John Wick’s bemused reflection beside his own in the mirror behind the bar. 

“Mr D’Antonio,” says the most feared wetworks specialist in the underworld and frequent star in Santino’s fondest, most private sexual fantasies, settling into the open seat beside him without being invited. “This seems to be a private function, my apologies.”

“Of course you are most welcome to join us, Mr Wick,” he replies, and waves the bartender over. “If we are not disturbing you with the celebrations.” Wick’s presence has not gone unnoticed by the members of the part who are more active in their world, elbows grinding into neighbors and unsubtle fingers pointing. He flatters himself that he is handling this with somewhat better grace, befitting his position, belying how often he’s abused himself to the thought of a bloody John Wick over the years. Wick receives a tumbler of bourbon from the bartender with barely-audible thanks. Santino tips the woman with a coin and she disappears from sight with polite professionalism.

“My congratulations to the happy couple,” Wick continues. He tips his glass towards Santino’s, and mechanically Santino returns the gesture. It’s the most John Wick has ever said to him directly in one encounter, he thinks, as their glasses clink together on the bar. “Saluti.” 

They drink, almost companionably. It’s not the first time he’s seen the man since his kidnapping, though it has been a few years since the last chance encounter at a coronation in the company of his father and Abram Tarasov. 

In the aftermath of the massacre to rescue Santino like a damsel in distress, in cementing a detente, if not a friendship, between his father and the Tarasovs, Wick had been instrumental in eviscerating the remains of the Romano’s business. He’d reported back to Giovanni, quietly informing them of how many dead in each assault over the course of weeks, and sometimes providing details for Giovanni’s satisfaction. Santino had been allowed—ordered, really, though it was no hardship—to attend these debriefings, standing at attention at Giovanni’s elbow to hear what destruction John Wick, _lo spettro_ , had wrought in his name. It was supposed to be a lesson of some kind, but whatever he was meant to have learnt, shame for his weakness in being snatched, perhaps, it hadn’t taken. 

Once, as he walked Wick silently to the door, the man paused and caught Santino’s hand in his. Inspected the healing scabs and freshly pink shiny scars around his wrist, running a clinical eye over the minor injuries, following that with a calloused thumb. Dropped his hand, taken Santino’s chin instead, studied his face intently. Santino had frozen, as had his new bodyguard, unsure of what to do with this unauthorised interaction. The bodyguard had not blushed, but Santino had, mortifyingly, deeply, the wounds on his face that still needed to heal properly throbbing, his mouth was hanging open idiotically, staring at John Wick staring at him. It had lasted no more than ten, fifteen seconds, before Wick released him and nodded with satisfaction. Wick had not been the first person to examine his healing scrapes and bruises—Viggo, Giovanni, Gianna, the doctor, all manhandling him like livestock—but his was the only touch that didn’t make him bristle or his skin crawl. 

It was, to use a phrase he learnt only later from an American girl at school, _formative._ She had been talking about some banal Disney cartoon. 

He meant picking at the scabs on his wrists until they stung and bled pinpricks at the edges and jerking off with John Wick’s name bitten into his lower lip. 

“I never thanked you, did I,” he blurts, when his drink has been drained, and another has discretely appeared at his elbow. He feels like he’s shouting over the noise of the party. “For the warehouse. And after.” 

Wick shrugs, considering him with dark eyes for a moment, before turning back to his glass. “Didn’t need to. You were just a kid then.” 

He finishes his bourbon, and receives another with a coin of his own for the bartender. In the mirror, Santino sees one of the American cousins lurking, hovering at an eager but nervous distance. Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all their dark world, the boogeyman has to walk into the one full of starstruck camorristi with no social graces. They’ll have all heard his story from fathers and uncles and older brothers, part of the D’Antonio legend, part of the Boogeyman’s. It does Santino’s reputation no particular good, but Giovanni had taken the opportunity to yoke the threat of John Wick to his own legacy. The part where he personally shot Romano is too often left out of those retellings. 

Santino makes meets his cousin’s gaze in the reflection—another Giovanni, a whole generation of idiots with flattering names and none of the intelligence or instincts of their namesake—and tries to channel his father’s aura of threat. _Fuck off_ , he telegraphs, willing it into Giovanni Jr’s thick skull. 

Santino flatters himself it’s worked when the mirrored idiot bolts, until he notices the direction of John Wick’s narrowed gaze in the same reflection, meets the man’s gaze himself. Even indirectly, only seen through in the dark glass, Santino’s brain stutters and skips momentarily, realising that Wick is standing far closer than he needs to, even in the crowded room, that Wick is not regarding him with the clinical, professional intent of their previous meetings. Santino breaks first, for which he cannot be embarrassed. He sips his drink for cover, to buy a moment, and when he looks back Wick is studying him directly. 

The room, already stuffy, too crowded, is suddenly unbearable. Santino shifts on his seat, taps the base of his glass on the bar, then gestures towards the open door. He feels emboldened, slightly mad, shades of when he only knew this man as _John_ , the Baba Yaga, and he killed his first man. “Regardless, Mr. Wick, you must allow me to thank you somewhere more quiet. If nothing more, than for the gun I borrowed and never returned.” 

John Wick laughs, honestly laughs, visibly startling those standing too close. John Wick is not supposed to laugh at their family weddings, especially not at something snobbish, prickly Santino has said. “I forgot about the gun,” he says, and reaches around Santino, thoroughly in his personal space, to collect Santino’s discarded jacket for him, then drapes it around his shoulders. It is startlingly intimate for a man he’s barely spoken to since he was sixteen. “The rooftop is quiet this time of night.” 

****

There is a small terrace garden on the roof of the Continentale, as luxuriously outfitted as any other area in the hotel but always sparsely-peopled. It’s too exposed, overshadowed by the Capitoline Hill and overlooking the ruins of the Forum, and in full sight of the public. The sheep, the outsiders, can peep into what looks to outsiders an obscene display of wealth and glamour, but the terrace’s tourist vistas also allow too many clear shots for anyone willing to risk the wrath of Julius and the High Table for conducting business on the grounds. 

It’s crisp in the open air. A breeze rustles the foliage of the exactingly-pruned myrtle shrubs that provide a modicum of privacy around decadent seats and low braziers. John—and in the close space of the elevator, he had corrected Santino’s formality with quiet insistence that he was _John_ , not _Mr Wick_ —leads on towards the darkest corner, the most secluded alcove above the ruins. They have both the terrace and the view to themselves, closely lit only by the glow of embers and the ambient light of a sliver moon. The lights of the door back into the safety of the hotel, soft lamps, seem alien and distant. 

If Santino were given to flights of fantasy beyond the sexual or the revenge, and sentiment beyond a lingering fondness for his long-dead sainted mother, he might consider this romantic. What it is is _dangerous_ , sharing a plush low sofa with John Wick by moonlight, answering quiet, leading questions about his life. It’s foolish to tell the boogeyman meaningless _shit_ about his time at university, about taking some terms part time or on leave to work for his father in New York or London, about Gianna’s disastrous failed engagement to a British banker, her one rebellion, about the first time he fired a grenade launcher and nearly fell on his ass from recoil. 

John laughs at his stories, tells him a different version of the dramatic circumstances surrounding Gianna’s international incident of a breakup—they’re closer in age, she’s more involved in the business, it only makes sense that she’s friends with him—asks about his ideas for the family as if he’s genuinely interested. It feels real, oddly normal, like a _date_ , and beyond the years-long, pitiable puppy crush he’s harboured over John Wick, Santino feels like he might actually _like_ the man. 

At the same time, it feels like a performance, a thin veneer of normalcy, a lacquer over who they are that cracks and splinters at pressure points, and when he meets John’s gaze for too long. In those moments, he goes hot despite the chill breeze, like the brazier has spilled under his skin and settled in the pit of his stomach, and reflected in John’s eyes. 

The ice in their glasses is long melted when a lull in the conversation prompts him: “I still haven’t thanked you, _properly_ , John,” he says, and shifts. He’s been sitting half-curled around his own leg, foot tucked under his thigh, chin on his knee; if Gianna were here she’d slap him upside the head for being so undignified, wrinkling his clothes. He uncurls now, sets his empty glass on the ground. John in turn lounges back against the arm of the chaise, at home in the deep shadow, slowly swirling the dregs in his glass. 

Santino has the unnerving sense of being watched by an apex predator, like he’s accidentally on purpose wandered into some dark primeval territory. It is not an unpleasant sensation to be so closely studied by such a hunter. 

A siren echoes off the ruins behind them, cutting through the night and rattling the ancient stones. It startles him, and John takes advantage of his brief distraction to take him by the wrist—not tight, not a display of strength, just holding him gently. Santino knows, intellectually, that he can’t feel the heat of John’s hand through the layers of wool and silk and cotton between their skin, but he half-feels it anyway, staring at the long fingers like he’s hypnotised. John sets his glass down beside Santino’s, still holding him fast. Santino feels his heart speeding up, breath coming short when John shifts his grip and runs condensation-cool fingers under his sleeve, pushing it up to bare the faded scar around his left wrist. The skin hasn’t been tender there for years, but he still shivers when John’s thumb traces over the remaining mark of their first meeting, bites his lip. 

“I didn’t think this would leave scars,” John says, and he’s not looking at Santino’s wrist any more, but his mouth. It wasn’t supposed to have scarred, but Santino had picked at it and picked at it and picked at it, to feel the raw edges and remember John’s touch until it left a permanent reminder.

He can’t say this without sounding insane. He licks his lips, watches John’s eyes watch him do it.

“I owe you my life,” he says instead. “And a gun, I suppose. I still have that one, I’m rather fond of it. So, thank you, Mr. Wick.” 

John laughs, quiet and without malice. He releases his grip on Santino’s wrist, drops a hand to rest above his knee instead. Santino doesn’t look but he is intensely aware of its weight, the strength restrained behind the soft squeeze he receives. “You scared the shit out of Viggo when you started laughing, but your hands stopped shaking before you shot Romano. It only seemed fair to let you keep it. As a souvenir.”

A man of singular focus, someone had called John Wick, and Santino feels every bit of that focus trained on him now. He shivers under the heat of it, under the intensity of his own realisation that he’s about to make what could be a monumentally stupid move. To kiss the boogeyman.

John anticipates his ungraceful lunge, gets big hands on his waist under his jacket and holding him steady as Santino straddles his lap. It’s no fairytale, storybook moment, no sweet meeting of new lovers by moonlight, when Santino leans in and kisses him, running his fingers through John’s hair. It could almost be chaste, the gentle touch of closed lips, except for John’s fingers digging into his flesh, except for the way Santino twists his fingers too-tightly into the material of John’s suit. Santino kisses him again, lingeringly. When he pulls back, just millimetres, John takes control. 

The greedy, eager noise he makes when John kisses him properly is involuntary, as is the needy roll of his hips against John’s stomach. It is overwhelming, to have John Wick grip him by the back of the neck, holding him in place to be kissed, invaded, until he’s breathless and shivering. 

Eventually John’s hold loosens, at his neck and lower on his waist, and hands wander: over his ass, untucking his shirt and sliding hot and calloused up his spine. Santino is rapidly getting hard, uncomfortable in tightly-tailored trousers already under tension from being stretched indelicately across John’s lap. When John turns his legendary focus to biting a stinging trail down Santino’s throat, he bites his own lip to muffle his needy, slutty whine. It’s unseemly, how aroused he is already, compared to how in control John still seems, how buttoned up he still is: not a stitch out of place, only a few faint wrinkles where Santino’s rumpled him. 

But Santino also knows exactly what he wants, and he usually gets what he wants. He slides his fingers into John’s long hair, twists his fingers in. Doesn’t pull _hard_ , but pulls enough to stop the boogeyman from sucking a mark into the hollow of his throat, gets John’s attention. 

“Fuck me,” he demands. He’s glad of the dark, feeling flushed and dishevelled and exposed despite not a single new button having been undone. John’s hand on his bare skin, under his rucked up shirt, feels like a brand and a promise. He drags his other hand, not tangled in John’s hair, down the man’s chest, his stomach, stopping just above his fly for a moment. The low rumble when Santino inches his hand down to rest over John’s cock makes him feel giddy, with power, with arousal, a rush of blood to his own cock and his cheeks. “Fuck me, John Wick.”

It’s only after he says it that he realises perhaps, demanding to be fucked on the roof of the Continentale, no matter how late at night, without any sort of slick, is not the wisest course of action. John seems to recognise this, and takes decisive action.

“Can’t have you go back downstairs like this,” John says, and he sounds more affected than he’s let on. He opens Santino’s trousers, and exposes his cock to the cold night air with deft hands. He doesn’t _touch_ , though, just looks for a long moment, one hand on each of Santino’s inner thighs like he’s holding him open for display. “Need to take the edge off, first.” 

Which is how Santino finds himself being jerked off by John Wick on the roof of a hotel.

John strokes him dry, dragging a broken whine out of his throat. Santino buries his face in John’s shoulder, bucking into his rough hand. It’s fast, mean, and he’s not going to last long, which normally would be embarrassing. But the promise of getting fucked, properly, by a man he has been sexually obsessed with for years is mitigating it somewhat, as is the hand on the back of his neck. Santino belatedly fumbles at John’s fly, to return the favor. John’s fingers in his hair tighten, tugging roughly, mimicking Santino’s earlier demand for attention.

“Leave it,” he rumbles, using his grip on Santino’s hair to pull him upright, too far, spine at a taut angle that strains his muscles and exposes his throat. John bites him, just above his pulse, just shy of savage, and Santino comes all over his hand. 

Distantly he thinks that he can’t, absolutely cannot, let John Wick leave marks on his skin that others might see. That his father might see. And he absolutely cannot stop him, not because John has him straining and shuddering and stupid from coming but because he _wants_ it in a way that should frighten him. 

Once John loosens his grip, Santino slides off his lap, panting and dazed. John leans over and kisses him, almost gentle, and wipes his soiled hand on the sofa in a gesture so unromantic that Santino laughs, cupping John’s jaw to kiss him again. 

“Clean yourself up,” John orders, rough but not cruel. He stands, leaving Santino to tuck his softening cock away and try to make himself presentable. It’s probably a lost cause; he would be better off praying that they don’t run into anyone with functional eyesight. He sits up, and comes to eye level with the bulge of John’s cock in his trousers. He licks his lips, feels the too-soon stirrings of a fresh erection. It’s instinctive, unplanned, but he leans in and mouths the evidence that death’s emissary wants to fuck him as badly as he wants to be fucked. 

He is taken by the throat, thumb over his pulse, fingers wrapped across his jugular. If he could get hard again immediately, he would, when John squeezes with the faintest pressure. Instead, Santino stands, and John kisses him with his hand still around his throat. 

“Your room or mine?” Santino manages to ask with a modicum of dignity when he’s no longer being kissed, considering he’s wondering if in fact it is physically possible to get hard again this soon. It’s not a fair question: his room adjoins his sister’s, across from his father’s. 

“Mine,” John growls, and lets him go, almost seeming regretful. In the brighter light of the terrace, out of the shadows, he is more rumpled than Santino thought, a deeply validating sight. Santino doesn’t want to know what he looks like if this is the case. 

The dark mirrored walls of the elevator reveals that in fact he looks like he’s already been fucked. Santino slips his hands into his pockets and tries to give off an air of nonchalance, lest the doors slide open and divulge that John is standing far, far too close to him for anything other than the promise of forthcoming intimacy. 

Beneficially for Santino’s sanity, they’re uninterrupted between the terrace and the privacy of John’s suite. John locks the door behind them, sliding the chain across the latch. Santino approaches the bed, shrugging his irredeemably wrinkled jacket off. The bed is covered in the Sommelier’s wares: an intimidating array of firepower and hand-to-hand weapons, organised in courses that suggest a forthcoming bloodbath. It is arousing, in truly fucked up ways considering he spends most of his life around men carrying similar amounts of guns. 

“Here for work, I see,” he says, taking one of the knives. He tests the flawlessly-honed point against his finger, idly, until a pinprick of blood appears and he hisses in pain; he drops the knife carelessly on the bed. “Hopefully not for anyone I care about.”

John presses bodily against him from behind, wrapping an arm around Santino’s chest and biting his ear. “I don’t think you care about many people,” he growls. 

He takes Santino’s hand, his bleeding fingertip, and takes it in his mouth. Santino laughs, involuntary and mad like the first time they met, and John grinds against his back. “You’re crazy,” John mutters, once he’s licked Santino’s finger clean. “Absolutely fucking crazy.” 

“Are you going to fuck me, or just cuddle me?” Santino demands. He doesn’t care who John is here to murder, as long as it’s not him. Or if it is him, it happens after he gets fucked. 

It is apparently the correct goad. John manhandles him to the floor beside the bed; he goes willingly, still laughing. Undressing is unsteady, John grinding against him and kissing him with sharp teeth, but eventually Santino is naked with John between his thighs and his own shirt still half-caught beneath him; neither of them can be bothered to get John’s pants off, just open. He’s rapidly getting hard again, with John rutting against his stomach.

“John, come on,” he whines, digging his nails into the meat of John’s shoulders.

“Fucking crazy,” John reminds him, and presses two fingers into Santino’s mouth. It’s invasive, filthy, with the lingering taste of his own come on his tongue. Santino sucks eagerly, groaning around them, before pushing John’s hand down insistently, demanding. He cannot be bothered to be ashamed of how he arches, moaning, against John when both fingers work into him roughly, insufficiently slick for comfort or ease. He’s making terrible choices; he’ll hurt tomorrow, feel it for days urging John to get another finger in him with nothing but saliva to ease the way. 

It’s too soon, he knows, when he spits in his own hand and wraps it around John’s cock, spreads precome and and saliva down the not unimpressive length. John doesn’t insult him by asking if he’s ready, or if he’s sure, just lines up and pushes in, insistent and too big and perfect, kisses him through it and swallows Santino’s cracked moan. He’s pinned, panting, sore. When John bottoms out, he doesn’t give Santino a moment to catch his breath, or adjust, fucks him shallow and slow. Santino has to take it, can only whine and score his nails down John’s back, pinned by the man’s weight and the cock splitting him open. 

The carpet burns across his shoulders when John shifts his weight, pulls out nearly all the way and shoves back in. Santino wails, undignified and overwhelmed, and John does it again, groaning against his throat, setting a brutal rhythm. His cock rubs against John’s belly, smearing wetly already; all he can do is take what John gives him and try to keep up. 

It’s perfect. He feels filthy, unhinged, overheated. He thinks he might come without either of them touching his dick, and if John wrapped a hand around his throat and cut off his air, or snapped his neck, he would die happy. And probably come as he died. 

The Boogeyman is right, he _is_ fucking crazy.

It’s not as upsetting a thought as it should be. 

John shifts again, pulls out, sits back on his heels. Santino’s chest heaves from the sudden absence of John’s weight, feeling empty and untethered. He covers his face with his hands, tries to catch his breath, sprawled open on the floor like a crime scene. He misses any sign that John is planning to grab him by the hips and haul him bodily across the carpet, hitching his hips up so his spine arches. 

“Fuck, _fuck_ ,” he moans, thrashing as John shoves back in, any lingering trace of civility, the last cracking lacquer of their pretense and normalcy, gone. After a few experimental thrusts, John watching the slide of his cock in and out of Santino’s spread ass, he returns to a punishing, grinding rhythm that edges against his prostate. 

Santino comes too soon, teeth set into his own wrist, barely muting a howl. It’s feral, ripped out of him, and John answers it with a snarl that crawls into Santino’s spine and sets its teeth into his id. John fucks him through it, as he trembles in his sweat and over-sensitized nerves. Any remaining restraint seems gone.

John comes with his hands digging bruises into Santino’s thighs, bruises that he distantly thinks he might spend the next week prodding in private moments. He pulls out sooner than Santino would like him to; he wants to luxuriate, to _wallow_ , in the intimacy of John deep in him with the urgency subsided. Instead, John joins him on the carpet, the room suddenly quiet but for their breathing side by side, barely touching. 

Impulsively Santino shifts closer, pressing himself alongside John’s body. Considers what to say, once he catches his breath properly. He’s suddenly exhausted, aches settling in and the languor of coming twice in succession, and he’s been up since six am for wedding bullshit. 

He can’t stay, if only because he refuses to either stay on the floor or wait for John to clear the arsenal from the bed for a few hours’ stolen sleep and trying to sneak back to his room in the nick of time before the denizens of the Continentale awake and resume what business is allowed on premises. He doesn’t know if John would even want him to stay, if he’s a diversion before going to work on some poor fucker who doesn’t know death has been set after him.

John stretches, wedges his arm under Santino’s head in an oddly tender gesture. They stay in companionable silence for he’s not sure how long, until he can’t stand the sensation of come cooling on his skin any longer. 

****

Hours later, with the sun long crept above the hotel’s parapet, Santino sits in the Continentale’s lounge with his father and sister, security once more lingering in the corner of his eye. Giovanni’s eagle eye has already recognised that he is worse for wear, despite being immaculately attired, not a hair out of place, at their table before the rest of them. 

His father probably thinks he’s drunk too much, not suspecting that he’s spent the night getting fucked within an inch of his life by the man to whom his life is owed. The disapproval, the disdain with which he is found wanting, is another sliver under his skin, no longer the gaping wound it was when he was a child but a constant low sting. 

He doesn’t care, for once. He takes a doppio and lets Giovanni’s cold chastisement wash over him with a facade of contrition. University starts again in a week, and the family will be dispersing back to their habitual haunts: Giovanni and Gianna to Naples, aunts and uncles back to America or their villages and their forelock-tugging obedience to Giovanni’s will. He will be left in Rome, to return to the privacy of his apartment and the nominal freedom to make his own decisions with a minimal security detail. 

Gianna is flawlessly turned out, looking like she’s had a full night’s sleep; with no small amount of vanity he envies her skill with cosmetics, the freedom to wear them, to disguise that she, too, has had a rather wilder night than Giovanni would approve of. 

They’re discussing plans for expansion in New York, of which he is only half-aware, although he’s supposed to be taking more responsibility there once he’s finished university in a few months. But Gianna’s attention shifts: someone worthy of recognition is near, and she and his father both rise. He follows, only a second delayed, to see John standing just beyond the ring of their security, respectfully waiting to be recognised before approaching. 

“Gianni, buon giorno,” Gianna purrs, predatory, as she greets him with a kiss to both cheek. Santino wonders briefly if they’ve ever fucked, and then viscerally remembers John pressing him face first against the tiles in the shower, fingering his own come back into Santino’s ass in the shower not six hours prior. He’d gone back to his room alone, but left his address, his phone number, scrawled on the hotel stationery, an unspoken invitation. It doesn’t matter if his sister’s fucked the man before, he’s the one with a map of bruises on his thighs and the rash of carpet burn across his shoulders from John Wick’s attention this morning.

“Signore D’Antonio, signorina. Santino.” John’s accent is serviceable, but his deference towards Giovanni is perfect as he shakes the old man’s hand. They invite him to join, but he defers politely, and excuses himself after brief pleasantries. As John retreats towards the hotel door, as Giovanni and Gianna resume discussing their plans for New York.

“Why not borrow Wick from the Tarasovs to take care of it,” he muses, and hides his satisfaction behind the thick white rim of his espresso as Giovanni agrees, for the first time, with his suggestion. 


	3. Chapter 3

The apartment is far too large for just one person, the top floor and terrace of the old palazzo, but it’s _his_ , not Giovanni’s, not the family’s, and he guards it jealously against invasion by his father and sister. If they want him to dance attendance on them in Rome, he goes to the family estate, or neutral ground. 

The tenants in his building fear and respect his father, but they remember his mother, when her family looked after them and their interests in the neighborhood, the years she spent lovingly restoring their home to its former glory before her marriage into the South and the System. Gianna inherited the vineyards, the villa at Como, when their mother died, but he treasures this place, crammed into the throbbing heart and narrow streets of Rome more than any postcard view and private cellar, than the suffocating warren of rooms and ragged ruins on the estate.

Now he rattles around alone under high ceilings, living under the watchful eyes of frescoed pantheons and cooling his heels on gleaming mosaics, smoking on the roof terrace at night when security is lax. On the estate, he is surrounded by employees, hangers-on, cut off from the city and watched constantly.

At home his skeleton staff, loyal to him through his mother and his own efforts, live downstairs alongside his father’s security; the latter are never far but never allowed to penetrate comfortably into the private recesses of his home. In the floors below hum the petty concerns to which he is allowed to attend during university, the cultivation of minor friends with potential: his football fuckbuddy, a newly prominent local politician. The semi-legitimate storefronts of restorers and antiques dealers, with their narrow storefronts at street level and sheets of gold leaf or smoke-aged oils displayed in crowded windows. 

Three days after the wedding, Santino shakes hands with the woman restoring his _Judith and Holofernes_ in the shop below his flat. It will be hanging in pride of place again in a week, she assures him; clean and dark, with a new frame that is a masterpiece in its own right. He shoulders his bookbag, carries the too-heavy net bag full of shopping his ageing housekeeper left downstairs into the lift, and returns to his quiet sanctuary above the Tiber. 

He lets the heavy door slam behind him, ditches his bookbag and kicks off his trainers in the foyer. Signora Elena has left him all the bottles, _again_ , clinking quietly against one another; he may have to give in and let her bring her daughter in to help if she’s getting too frail to carry a few bottles of wine and some fruit from the lift to the kitchen. She’ll be happy, pinch his cheek like he’s one of her own grandchildren, and praise his generosity to the other old ladies at mass. 

The marble floors are slick under his bare feet, a pleasant counterpoint to the stultifying heat rising outside. At least with the family gone he can dress to please himself, so he isn’t buttoned into layers of wool and silk as the mercury climbs and the hordes of tourists just beyond in Piazza Navona begin to stink. No tactically-lined jackets on thick-aired afternoons, just designed-threadbare t-shirts and jeans, low v-necks, scuffed trainers, disguised as one of the sheep. 

He’s vain, he knows, and is frequently reminded by his father and sister, in the recitations of his failings lest he ever be so stupid as to forget (vain, and intemperate, and risk-taking, and foolish, and spoiled, not suited to the business, as if he’s ever been given a chance to prove himself). The more his father picks at him to put less care into his appearance, the more he obsesses, trying to satisfy Giovanni’s inherently conflicting demands.

But he also craves the attention that comes from giving into his vanity, the lingering glance from a stranger on the street or John in the bar; he’s still faintly pleased by the man earlier who tripped over a paving stone, too busy making eyes at Santino in the window of the shop to watch the uneven street. Santino had laughed, openly, rude and delighted, and turned back to discussing the treatment of his picture. 

John is waiting for him, as he passes into the grand salon. 

Santino doesn’t see him, at first, but catches the too-close and too-identifiable waft of gunsmoke, the presence of someone behind him where no one should be. He drops the bag of groceries--the bottles smash at his feet--and goes for his knife, concealed at the small of his back. He’s slammed backwards, thrown against the wall before he can pull it fully, wrist pinned behind him against the cold stone of the dado rail, a hand around his throat. He scrabbles, _claws,_ at the hand before he realises he isn’t being choked, just held, it’s his own adrenaline fucking up his breathing. 

He registers John as the intruder a heartbeat later, all in black, unmistakably armed as the butt of a holstered handgun digs into Santino’s chest. 

Santino swallows, hard against strong fingers, and tries to control his breathing. Idiotically, he has a flash of concern for the fresco behind his head, the wine leaching out and staining his marble floor. He forgets all that moments later when John kisses him. He reeks of acrid smoke; kisses like he’s trying to climb into Santino’s skin. Santino moans, harsh and involuntary, blood rushing to his cheeks, his cock. 

“Are you here to kill me?” he asks, shakily, when John finally lets him catch his breath. The man is filthy, soot in his pores, unshaven, something feral in his eyes that wasn’t there nights before. Santino meets his gaze, unsettled by the nearly animal need he sees. 

The wine reaches his feet, pooling between his toes. There must be glass everywhere, but he can’t look to see, with John’s hand still tense around his neck. He squirms under John’s weight, pushing at him with his free hand. “John. _John_.” 

“If I wanted to kill you, you wouldn’t have known I was here,” John says, a moment too late to be truly reassuring. He releases Santino though, and gives him enough space to free his hand. He rubs at his wrist a moment, and considers the probability that John is lying about his purpose in Santino’s home.

It does seem unlikely after a greeting like that, the way John watches him as he touches the hot skin of his own throat. The Baba Yaga is known for violence, focus, not deception. 

Santino slaps him, hard enough that his palm stings. 

John lets him. He’s under no illusions that if John wanted to stop him, he could have. 

“You invited me,” John says, something almost like hesitance creeping across his handsome face, lingering under the grime, chasing out some of the inhuman gleam in his dark eyes. He’s pulled taut, stiff, coiled force as if prepared for a tactical retreat. 

  
“Not to break into my house smelling like a bonfire, _stronzo_.” He reaches across the bare inches separating them, toys with John’s tie for a moment, wraps it around his hand and tugs sharply so John has to lean in or be choked. “Call first, next time.” 

“I will, next time,” John agrees, and kisses him again, with his tie like a leash in Santino’s fist. He sounds like he’s been unsure there’s going to be a _this_ time. It sends a frisson of lust and something else—power, maybe—down Santino’s spine, makes him feel forgiving now that he’s sure he’s not about to be murdered. “Sorry.” 

Santino allows himself to be boxed in against the wall again, John’s hands spread around the curve of his ass. The dado rail forces his spine to arch, pushing his hips forward, making it easier for John to rut against him. He wraps his arms around John’s neck and rakes his nails gently down the curve of the man’s skull; this is the apology he really wants. 

Eventually, though, the discomfort outweighs the appeal of kissing John pressed up against a priceless Baroque fresco, standing in the damp spread of alcohol. And his jeans are getting uncomfortably tight in sensitive areas. “I have a bedroom—several bedrooms—we could be much more comfortable in,” he suggests, kissing John’s scruffy, smudged cheek. 

John steps back, drawing Santino away from the wall with him like he’s unwilling to take his hands off him for a moment. Santino only just barely remembers the broken bottles—“Glass, John, the glass,” he says, digging his heels in. John doesn’t hesitate, just hoists him like he’s nothing, so Santino can wrap his legs around John’s waist, clear of slivers glinting dully in the dark puddle. 

It’s clear John has already been through the apartment in his absence, because even once Santino’s feet are back on solid ground, John doesn’t need any direction to make a beeline for the bedroom. John kisses him the whole way, backing him down the dark hallway, hands on Santino’s hips. The frenzy with which he was greeted seems to have faded somewhat, but still sits at a degree of intensity that _should_ worry him. He half-wonders if John is always like this after working, but it doesn’t really matter, when the back of his knees hit the end of the mattress and he tumbles backwards onto the disarray of unmade sheets. 

Santino inches up until he’s half-propped against pillows, but John lingers at its foot like a stormcloud threatening on the horizon, dark against the clear sunlight streaming in high windows.

  
“Lose the fucking arsenal and come here,” Santino orders, growing impatient, petulant. Hypocritical, too, with his knife still in the waist of his jeans, his stolen Glock under a pillow, a Beretta in the bedside drawer next to a mostly-full bottle of lube and a box of ammunition. His phone is still trapped under his ass in his pocket; a weapon in its own way if he called for his security. John sheds layers of wool and the death-dealing tools of his trade, with degrees of care varying from entirely lacking (his jacket, his belt) to the nearly-reverent (handguns, a twist of wire, knives of the same vintage as his own, but with battle scars). He only prowls up the bed to settle between Santino’s legs when he’s stripped to the waist, presses him into the mattress. 

John is tense, muscles rigid under his hands, but he kisses Santino like he’s oxygen. Not for a drowning man but feeding a fire, banked under his skin like coals. Santino curls his hand around John’s neck, rubbing slow circles with his thumb. He’s content to be kissed like this, twined together in the sunlight raking across his bed, as John slowly melts, uncoils. John’s hand slides under his t-shirt, up over his chest, runs his thumb over Santino’s nipple.

He arches, already sensitive and easy. John splays his hand across the small of Santino’s back, brushing against the slim handle of his knife in the waist of his jeans. 

“You should learn to use this properly,” he says, fingers sliding lower under the handle, towards Santino’s ass. He sounds distracted. 

“Teach me later.” Santino is equally distracted, he would have to admit; John has started kissing under his jaw, teasing, biting gently. There’s a moment of mental arithmetic: can he cover this, will he see anyone who he needs to hide a hickey from, does he _care_ enough about any of those enough to make John stop this time. He really doesn’t, he decides, using his hand on the back of John’s neck to urge him on. There’s a perverse pleasure in it, beyond the physical sensation heating his blood, to the idea of displaying the evidence of John Wick’s interest in _him_ , the same way he wore the scabs on his wrists back to school. 

Only when he’s satisfied that he’ll have a bruise, well above what anything he owns would cover, does Santino let him up. 

John lingers, though, gives him another mark, lower, sucking into his skin until Santino is shuddering under him. Only then does he urge Santino’s shirt off, over his head and momentarily binding his wrists in a tangle of buttery soft cotton. The urgency is building again, hands slipping across bodies in greedy sweeps. John returns again and again to his chest, burnishing his skin with repeated passes of fingers over his nipple. 

Santino wriggles out of his jeans and briefs, kicks them off the bed so the knife skitters out and his phone thuds dully; replaceable, uninteresting, it could shatter like the bottles for all he cares. He preens under John’s hungry gaze, admires the scarred lines of John’s body as he strips the rest of the way, before tearing his eyes away and rolling to rummage through his bedside table for lube. It would almost be insulting, how little attention John pays to the Beretta Santino pulls out in searching for the bottle, except it might be something like trust that means he only spares it a glance. 

The bottle is taken off his hands immediately once he finds it. Santino lolls against his pillows, arms flung lazily and inelegantly over his head, with John between his thighs, fingers briefly, almost admiringly aligned with the greening bruises he’d laid down three nights before. 

Slick fingers push into him, two at once. John works him open with all the care they’d disregarded on his floor, until Santino is flushed and panting, squirming in the mess of his sheets. John fingers him like he’s defusing a bomb, watching his minutest reactions with the intensity of a life or death situation, like the slightest error will destroy them both. 

When John pulls his fingers out, Santino realises he’s wrong. He isn’t being defused. John holds him down, slides into him, and he laughs, vicious, against John’s cheek. He kisses the corner of John’s mouth, his eye, bites his ear, urging him to move. He’s being armed, a fuse lit, and he’s not sure it’s just for this fuck. 

“Do it, John,” he orders, even as John withdraws and shoves in with no tenderness. It’s heady, intoxicating, to feel dangerous in John’s hands. John fucks him steadily, just shy of tortuously slow; Santino rocks against him, mouths at the man’s jaw, his shoulder, in a parody of tenderness. He tastes of sweat, of ash and burnt petrol. He spreads his palms across John’s back, resisting the urge to score his nails into the Latin motto, add his own runes into the Russian symbols etched into skin. He likes the slow grind, the vulgar slide of John’s cock and the slick press of flesh, the way John’s breathing is already ragged, and doesn’t want to drive him faster. 

Yet. 

His bedroom door is wide open to the vacant apartment beyond, creaking quietly when people move on the floor below. Dust floats through the shifting afternoon sun. He could be more bothered about the risk of someone coming in. Should be. They’ve been long enough, he thinks, and arches against John to kiss him lazily. 

But John adjusts his stroke, makes Santino’s brain lurch out of its leisurely, sunbaked track. He slides a hand down to the small of John’s back, _now_ scrapes in with his nails. He groans quietly, half-forming the shape of John’s name, half-guttural whine. One or the other, or both, seems to affect John deeply. He echoes Santino’s groan, kisses him messy and needy.

Santino soon turns away from being kissed, revels in the frustrated snarl John lets out. Presses his lips against John’s ear, murmurs his name over, and over, punctuated only by increasingly breathless whines of _fuck_. 

John comes in silence, hips stuttering unevenly, breathing harshly against Santino’s neck. Santino licks a bead of sweat from his temple; he’s close to finishing, but John tries to pull out, too soon again. 

“No, John,” he orders, digs his nails meanly into already-scratched skin, soothes moments after with gentle fingertips. “Like this.” 

He wraps a hand around his own cock, in the bare space between them. Jerks himself slowly, makes a point of letting his knuckles, his wrist drag against John’s belly until John takes a hint and helps: pushing Santino’s hand away, running the rough pad of his thumb over the wet head so Santino whines and squirms from the overwhelming sensation. John is steadier already, stroking him fast, even until he shudders apart at the seams and comes with John’s name on his lips. 

In the long, sated minutes after he comes, he’s drowsy, smug. John withdraws his softening cock and retrieves his discarded t-shirt. He uses it to make a token effort at wiping them both down, an effort to which Santino makes no contribution although he makes a sleepy note to complain about the abuse of his expensive clothes later. John seems more settled, now, stretched across Santino’s soiled sheets. With another man, the easy presumptuous way he tugs Santino in to lie half atop him, head tucked into the curve of his shoulder would be maddening; he has kicked more than one lover out of his bed for assuming they would be welcome after he’s had his fun. 

But he’s content, even happy, to indulge this one.

“When do you leave Rome?” he asks, running his fingers across the broad planes of John’s chest. 

“Tomorrow night.” John’s carding fingers through Santino’s impossibly tangled curls. Lazy. Intimate.

  
  
“Stay. Have dinner with me.” He can call down to Signora Elena, his bodyguards, tell them all to fuck off for the night, in so many words. No one will see anything untoward in it, not even if it gets back to his father; it could so easily be a meeting, away from the prying ears of the Continentale. He’s supposed to be taking more interest in the family business, after all. Or they could be friends, as much as anyone in their world can be friends; John is friends with his sister, and he does owe the man a debt. Dinner at one of the quiet, impeccable _trattorie_ in his neighborhood is the least he could do. 

John hums assent. “Don’t have anything to wear,” he says eventually, but his tone suggests it’s a detail to be planned around, not an excuse. Santino takes it as settled and goes looking for his phone to make the arrangements, John’s hand on his ass when he has to roll half-off the bed to fish it from the floor. 

Calls finished, Santino lays back in the crook of John’s arm, squirms in and makes himself comfortable. The warmth of the room and the sweet ache of his muscles, adrenaline crash, are conspiring with the incongruous comfort of being held close by John Wick. Nowhere worth going will be serving dinner for hours. He wants to sleep. “Make yourself at home, if you want. But don’t wake me up,” he orders, closing his eyes, waving vaguely in the direction of the gun on the bedside table. “If anyone comes in, shoot them.” 

John laughs, sounds more like the man he’d met in the bar days before than the smoke-stained boogeyman who assaulted him in his own house. “If I shoot them it’ll wake you up.” 

“Then shoot them _quietly_.” Santino drifts off easily, untroubled by conscience or fear, with John stroking his arm. 

~~~~

He snaps awake to the distinctive click of a shotgun cocking nearby, darts his hand under the far pillow for his Glock instinctively before he remembers John is around somewhere. He’s alone in bed, and the sheets beside him are cool. He sits up, leaving the gun in its cozy nest, stretches languid and lazy, pleasantly sore.

John is cleaning his guns at the low table next to the window, incongruous on a scrolled, gilt Rococo sofa. In the dense, rosy afternoon light, he is magnificent: his bare back a map of scars and scratches over intricate, ugly tattoos, stripping down a Benelli shotgun with the spare, rapid competence that only comes from extreme familiarity. Santino rises, making plenty of noise while he pulls on his jeans.   
  
“You need better bodyguards,” John says when Santino drops inelegantly onto the sofa beside him. He’s showered, and shaved. Santino kisses his newly-smooth cheek. John’s used his toiletries; it makes him feel a mad rush of irrational possessiveness, that John smells like _him,_ blending into _his_ home. 

_His_ boogeyman. 

“If you can figure out how to tell my father that, _without_ telling him you think that because you broke into my house for a fuck, please feel free. Otherwise he’ll just kill me and save the trouble of hiring new security.” He settles in to watch John clean and reassemble the gun, draping himself around John’s back in a way that must be irritating, clingy, digging his chin into the meat of John’s shoulder. John doesn’t seem to mind.

“I’ll think of something.” John works methodically through the small armoury spread across the table, placing each back into a duffle bag at his feet as he went. Santino watches his hands in silence; he can strip and clean his own guns well enough, but John makes it seem like an art. “Just seems like a waste to let you get killed now.” 

Santino laughs. “How romantic,” he says, charmed by John’s matter of fact tone and utter lack of romance. “How many years before my life isn’t a waste of your skills?” He bites John’s ear. “Or should I measure it in how many fucks before I’ve paid you back for saving me? One for each man you killed on my behalf, maybe. A blowjob for each of the wounded. But would you count just the warehouse or the whole Romano enterprise?”

“That’s not…” John sounds suddenly frustrated, holding the components of a disassembled pistol. “You were… interesting. Back then. You _stole my gun_ .” He sets the pieces down, takes Santino’s hand instead to look at the ghosts of his zip tie scars. “After… you looked at me like I was doing it for you, not for business. Your dad only cared about the business of it, but you were… different. Not afraid. You _looked_ at me.”

Abruptly he turns, presses two fingers to a space between Santino’s ribs, then draws Santino’s hand to his own torso to feel the same spot. His eyes are inscrutable, intense and too close. “Blade flat, up through the ribs here, will buy you time. Practice it. Stay alive.” 

Santino has never really been afraid of John, not the way he should be. Not even with the man’s hand around his throat. 

It will probably get him killed someday. 


End file.
